The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.
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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
The poem I posted this morning started out as a response to William Carlos Williams' Spring and All -- I've been reading it in fits and starts over the past week or so and loving the physical and the auditory texture of the words, but far from sure they are making any semantic impact on my consciousness -- when I turn the page, the words I was reading do not seem to persist much as imagery or meaning. This is a common response of mine to long poetry and to dense prose, and the answer always seems to be, just enjoy the sounds and let the meaning follow if it will.
I got interested in this book when I realized that after so many years of pastiching "Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is just to say" on Making Light, I still don't have much knowledge of Williams beyond those two poems. In the interests of repeating the text, here are a few passages I am enjoying. (Generally I am pretty psyched and amazed by the use here of paragraphs within poetry.)
If anything of moment results -- so much the better. And so much the more likely it will be that no one will want to see it.
There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.
Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here. ...
The farmer in deep thought is pacing through the rain among his blank fields, with hands in pockets, in his head the harvest already planted.
o meager times, so fat in everything imaginable ! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays -- and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls -- our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure !
Ah -- here's the excerpt I was looking for -- the one that initially, when I was reading it, made me want to write this post, but which, when I went back to look, I could not find.
Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow -- that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide.
That or the imagination which in this case takes the form of humor, is known in that form -- the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quantity of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: quite plainly we have no appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves -- by acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would drink is too vast -- but at the same time we realize that extension in our case is not confined to the intestine only. The stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quantity of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind.
The path to understanding verse
must lie through repetition --well,
that's where my thoughts are leading me,
internal iteration linking
letters on the page to solid
consonants and sibilation
nothingness, annihilation
pausing where there's punctuation--
Write the letters large enough,
inscribed inside my skull, retraced,
and give my mind no choice except
to follow where they lead, to paint
the pictures they express, to put
myself inside the poet's psyche:
See what he sees, maybe, or self-
consciously be made to see
exactly where my failure lies
to get across what's bugging me
my fault as reader or as writer,
guilt external to the page, the
page can feel no guilt, it's paper,
blank until I taint it with
my thoughts, my visions, my regret,
my happy-ever-after longing;
Strike a key and watch the letter
print itself, its inky form
laid down forever with its partners.
Sing in silent chorus from the
blankness of the page.
posted morning of August 28th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Poetry
Many thanks to Holly Hughes for introducing me to The Kinks' song "Lost and Found" -- I had never heard it before today, and boy is it a beautiful song. So John came over this afternoon and of course we had to try and work out a cover version of it... It is as John says "a little too perfect" for today.
How did we do? Well... I am by no means any Ray Davies. But I think what we came up with after a couple of takes is starting to sound pretty good. See what you think:
Notes: I need to sing it a step lower I think, or something. It was very happy-making, successfully to modulate to a new key at the end of the song though -- I don't think we've ever actually done that before.
Okay, not much to link these together really, other than that both are taken in Poland and both are very striking visually. Here is a couple kissing at the Woodstock music festival in Kostrzyn nad OdrÄ… -- where the mud is an intentional part of the concert experience rather than a by-product of rain:
The photo is from Peter Bohler's Come on, feel the mud feature for the New York Times website.
And here is the Krzywy Domek -- "Crooked House" -- in Sopot:
The picture of Krzywy Domek is one of 50 Strange Buildings shared by Google+ user Ajal Shan. It inspired me to (a) think of Heinlein's story And he built a crooked house; (b) think of the nursery rhyme about the crooked man; (c) look up the Polish translation of that poem, which would appear to be:
Był krzywy człowiek i szedł krzywą dróżką.
Znalazł krzywy grosik za krzywą obórką.
Złapał krzywą myszkę i nosił ją w worku,
i wszyscy mieszkali razem w krzywym dworku.
(This is based only on seeing it at blogger Kim Dzong Il's site, I can't vouch for its accuracy. The back-translation from Google is close enough to be plausible.)
So the big one is coming in today... My plan is to finish taping up the basement windows this morning, and hole up with some books until it blows over. Maybe John will come over and we can play some hurricane music while we wait for Irene!
Hey, this is a nice find! Some random poking around YouTube and I stumbled on this early recording of "Candy and a Currant Bun"... Following on some discussion in the comments there leads me to Harvested Records and a bootleg bonanza! "What Syd Wants" is recordings of 1967 gigs in Copenhagen and Rotterdam, and is only a small bit of what they've catalogued there. You can download the media tracks for it at Guitars 101. Some bizarre, some great, a couple of throw-away tracks.
Wow... 13 minutes of "Interstellar Overdrive"...
posted evening of August 22nd, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Syd Barrett
I walked out to the end of the fishing pier on Washington Blvd -- about as far west as I could go without getting wet -- and looked back at the beach, the surf, the palm trees, at the pastel apartment buildings. It was Sunday morning and I had a plane home to catch.
I know Los Angeles much better as a setting for stories and novels and films (and blogs) than as a location. Visits to my grandparents' house once or twice a year over the course of my childhood were enough to familiarize me with a little eastern corner of Beverly Hills, and the Tar Pits, and one or two beaches; the city at large remained terra incognita, hundreds of miles of undifferentiated streets and freeways. The last time I was there was in 2005, to memorialize and to mourn my grandmother Marjorie. Yesterday we gathered in Marina del Rey to bid farewell to my grandfather Hershel's earthly presence; and today I am bidding farewell to this great unknown, Los Angeles, for what I imagine will be a long time.
Hershel looms large in my memories and aspirations. He was a man of science and an inventor, something I have wanted to be (or "wished I were", or wished I could be) at moments of my life. Together, Hershel and Marjorie founded the Biofeedback Institute of Los Angeles. When I was visiting with Hershel after Marjorie's memorial service he showed me a project he was working on, a simple virtual reality which the user controlled via headband-mounted EEG electrodes -- it struck me as the coolest thing I had ever seen and prompted me briefly to question all the choices I had made up to that point, choices that meant I was not working on something so amazing.
Aside from being a brilliant man and an innovator, Hershel was a deeply thoughtful, analytical man. When I am at my intellectual best I like to think I am carrying on some of the behaviors and thought patterns I learned from him. Very glad I was able to be present at his memorial, listen to people's memories of him and reconnect over his past. I do not feel it is appropriate to say he should "rest in peace" as he was, for all the years I knew him, a firmly committed atheist and materialist -- instead I will hope that his memory continues to live on after his presence is gone, and continues to affect the people who knew him.
This is a 
